How To Play CHORD MELODY On Guitar Using Just 3 CHORDS
Chord melody is one of the coolest things you can do on a guitar. You play the melody and the chords at the same time, using the chord notes to build the tune itself, so you get rhythm and lead happening in the same breath. Joe Pass built an entire career on it.
Which is exactly the problem.
Look up chord melody lessons and you'll mostly find advanced material, the kind built for players who already know their way around a fretboard blindfolded. If you've never done it before, or you've tried and gotten lost, that stuff is intimidating. Where's the entry point for someone who's never played a chord melody in their life?
That's the exact question a student asked me at a live event. He'd never attempted chord melody and called it one of his weakest areas. So instead of jumping straight to the advanced material, I walked him through the lowest-hanging fruit, live, one string at a time.
No fancy voicings. No jazz vocabulary you need a music degree to parse. Just a starting point simple enough to actually use the next time you pick up your guitar (1).
If harmonizing a melody with chords is new territory for you, my free eBook Finding Chords for Melodies walks you through the same skill in more depth, with audio and tab included.
- And no, you don't need Joe Pass hands. Regular human fingers work fine.
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet. So nice to see you. One of the most exciting way to play on a guitar is to play chord melodies.
That's when you play the melody and the chords at the same time. And in fact, you use the chords to create the melody.
You play chord notes under the melody notes so that you're playing essentially both melody and rhythm at the same time. Something like Joe Pass will do, or I mean, several other people. Joe Pass is probably the most famous doing that.
How do you develop that? How do you start?
There's plenty of resources out there on how to get better at that and how to study the advanced thing. But if you've never done it and you look at those resources, you're like, wow, that's way too advanced for me.
If you've never done chord melodies or if you are just getting started and you find yourself confused, where do you start? What is what are the lowest hanging fruit that you can get? What is the easy entrance to the world of chord melody?
Well, that's what I'm giving to you today because a student asked me how to begin playing chord melodies. And this is how you begin to play chord melodies.
I want to learn about how to practice chord melodies. I've never done it before, and it's perhaps one of my weakest areas in my guitar playing journey. So can you help me with practice methods?
Absolutely. Do you know your chords around the fretboard? Meaning if I'm telling you to play a C major chord on string two, three and four, how many ways you can play that?
Do you have that position? Do you know other positions for the C chord? Yes.
So just play those three strings. Yes. Do you know any other position for that?
Yeah. Wherever the next C chord is. Yes.
Exactly. Wherever the next C chord is. That's a good answer.
Definitely. So I'll be doing... Very good.
And you know the next position? I'll just repeat. Very good.
OK. Fantastic. You know those.
Yeah. Great. Check.
OK. So, the next thing will be start thinking... Actually, let's explain this to a few people yesterday, but let's do it in a different way with you.
OK. So let's say I'm going to play a C major scale, and I'm going to play a C major scale on the second string.
But what we're going to do, we're also going to play the chord under that. OK.
And we are going to use three chords. We're going to use C major, G major and F major. So 1, 4, 5, 1, 5, 4, whatever, of the scale.
So on the C note, we harmonize this with the first chord. So you're going to play the C note. The top must be the C note here.
Oh. So you want to play this position here.
Yeah, but just three strings. Right? Yeah.
Good. Then the next note is D. I could probably do this.
If I'm playing it over the C. Yeah, if you play it over the C. But we don't want to play it over the C.
We want to find the chord that contains D. So C does not contain the D note. F does not contain the D note.
But G does. So can you play a G major with the D on top and only those three strings?
On top, so yeah. Yeah. And it has to be a G chord.
So yes. So just, just, it will be like that. So let's go back and forth a couple of times.
So C, D. Then you have this. Making sense so far?
Yes. Good. Now the next note is E.
E is in the C chord, so we just play the C chord in there. Good. So let's play the beginning of the scale again.
Make sense so far? Yes.
The next note is F. F is not in C. F is not in G.
We need to use the F. Yes. Can you play that F note and also the chord on those three strings?
Oh, F, C and F. Yes. So you have to play this way.
Make sense? So now you have C, D, C, F.
So C, the note D chord G, the note E chord C, the note F chord F. So let's do the whole thing again.
And we also come back. Yep. And back.
Make sense? Yes.
And then we keep building the rest of our scale this way. On G you can use either C or G. It's completely up to you.
On A you can use F, on B you can use G, and on C. Make sense so far?
Yes, it does. This is one idea. You could have done this in a billion other different ways.
So what you're doing at the beginning, you could have gone... So just with the C chord. Or...
You could have done the C chord all the way through. Okay. Okay?
You could have done the C chord on C, E, G, and A, because it becomes like an A minor, and used the B diminished chord on D, F, and B.
You can invent as many of these as you want. Okay? These are three examples. There's not one right.
Basically, you're just trying to put the C chord in, because it's the key of C, and something else to cover the note that you cannot cover.
So essentially, you use the C chord for C, E, and G, and then anything else, any other chord from the key that contains the note you're targeting.
Yes. And you keep this note as the highest pitch. Yes.
The idea is that the highest pitch plays a scale. Okay.
And now, I am playing the scale, harmonized with the chords. Once I have the scale down, I can start playing melodies.
Yes. Okay? Now, the harmonization sometimes will work if I just use this stock thing, sometimes will not work exactly, but then I can change the chord later.
Okay? But as a starting point, you harmonize the scale. Right?
Boom. Out of the box. Out of the box.
I mean, sure, not a great accomplishment. Okay? I'm not saying…
Okay. And then the next one would be to do it on different sets of three strings?
I wouldn't even care about that. Of course. But we picked two, three, and four.
I picked two, three, and four because they sound nice, the shifts are nice, and there is space for the other fingers to do a number of other things.
Right. It's probably a couple of months away. No, not really.
I mean, just play the first position here that we were playing before. No?
You have a pinky. That's what I was doing. A monolith.
Then I was playing the D. I'm just finding the notes I have around. Right?
The next position I have this C major, which I play with a bar. So now I have all my fingers to play any note I have around there.
So it looks like I'm doing a lot. I'm just playing the C chord and put some notes on top. Okay?
But the idea is I harmonize a scale. So now I have a kind of a template, and then I can play a melody in that scale, and the chord just automatically follows from the shape I memorize.
Will it work every single time? No, because, again, you can harmonize the scale in several different ways.
But you get started with the idea of playing a melody, which is, again, in this case, just a scale, and playing some chord under it. Okay?
Yes. Later, you can play full chords. Right?
So at the bass, or you can do other things. Yes. Okay? Yes.
Create this little line, again, just a scale at the beginning. Put some chords under.
You're in the key of C, most of those chords will be C. Try with a minor key.
See what happens in a minor key, if you like it or not. Try the melodic minor, harmonic minor, and see what you can put in there.
Okay? Or this kind of thing. It starts this way, getting comfortable in playing the chord, but being mindful of what is the top note.
Thanks. It's a great start. Good.
Great place to start. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tommaso. Thank you.